Database Changes Done Right

I love reading The Daily WTF dealing with programmers’ stories, experiences, and the occasional code nightmare. While it’s fun to read, it also makes you aware of how easily you can mistakes yourself, especially in an unfamiliar programming language, even after years of programming experience.

A recent article was titled Database Changes Done Right, and I was surprised that it was not fun or horror story, but rather a serious article on database change management, along with a couple of rules to watch when implementing database schema changes (yes, those ugly dev – test – production stages).

I also felt connected with the topic of the article, because for a couple of years now, I develop software that should help other developers ease this burden of managing database changes:

dbscript (blog, website, download) is a web application that stores database versions in repository (i.e. MSSQL database), calculates schema change scripts, stores definitions of table value initialization scripts and C# constant declarations, and keeps track of product version at customer installations. dbscript focuses on MS SQL Server databases in these areas, but also supports Oracle and PostgreSql databases for documentation purposes: document your database schema in a wiki or in a Word HTML file, or generate a data diagram with just a couple of mouse clicks.

SMOscript (blog, website, download) is a command-line tool that generates SQL scripts for all objects in a MSSQL database (tables, views, stored procedures, etc) to a single file, or to one file per object. These generates scripts can be kept in directories covered by source control systems (SVN, TFS, etc), and thus SMOscript simplifies storing the scripts for each database version in a source code repository.

oraddlscript (blog, website, download) is a command-line tool similar to SMOscript, but covering Oracle databases.

checktsql (blog, website, download) is a Windows tool that verifies all objects in a database (views, functions, stored procedures) by executing them or selecting from them (each in a transaction that will be rolled back), and reporting any errors that occurred during their invocation.

This product summary does not cover the complete functionality of each program. As programs evolve, they gain a lot of functionality, as users (including me!) add requirements and contribute ideas. Feel free to add yours!